Product design question
Design a product for people moving to a new city.
- Product design
- Medium
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What this question tests
Tests product design for a life-transition moment: identifying the highest-friction pain points when moving and proposing a focused, sequenced solution.
How to approach it
- Segment the user: someone relocating for a new job or life change, distinct from someone moving locally within the same city.
- Identify pain points: finding a place to live, understanding a new neighborhood, transferring services (utilities, address changes), and building a new social or support network.
- Prioritize the core problem: neighborhood discovery and trust (safety, commute, community fit) is the hardest to solve with existing generic tools like maps or listing sites.
- Propose the solution: a relocation assistant that combines neighborhood insights (commute, safety, cost of living) with a checklist for logistics (utilities, address updates, local services).
- Define an MVP: start with a neighborhood-matching tool based on the user's priorities (commute, budget, lifestyle) before building the full logistics checklist.
- Define success: users who complete a move report higher satisfaction with their chosen neighborhood, and checklist completion rate for logistics tasks.
What a strong answer includes
- Distinguishes long-distance relocation from local moves, since the pain points (unfamiliar city, no local network) are meaningfully different.
- Identifies neighborhood trust and fit, not just apartment listings, as the hardest and most differentiated problem to solve.
- Sequences the MVP around matching first, logistics second, focusing on the highest-value, least-served problem before the more commoditized checklist features.
- Chooses a satisfaction-with-neighborhood-choice metric that reflects the actual outcome the user cares about, not just app usage.
Common mistakes
- Building a generic moving checklist app that ignores the harder problem of choosing where to live.
- Treating all movers the same regardless of whether they know the city already.
Likely follow-up questions
- How would you source trustworthy neighborhood data, especially for smaller cities?
- How would this product differ for someone moving domestically versus internationally?
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Learn the skill behind it
Chapters of the AI PM course that teach what this question tests.
- Chapter 4: Discovery and strategy for AI products
- Chapter 7: AI UX and human oversight: design for a system that is wrong sometimes
- Chapter 14: Get the job: the AI PM interview loop